Get in the Flow

I was lucky enough to attend Codebits again this year, and the event was awesome as usual. In the middle of all the things to see and do at the event I was able to present a talk again, this time focused on the topic of Flow-Based Programming. For those whose could not come to the event, here is the original talk description:

As software developers, every day we are faced with ever more complex
systems to run our applications. Single machines are not enough. Now
we need to orchestrate hordes of multicore CPUs, GPUs and DSPs to run
our applications in a scalable, distributed way and this is hard.

Flow-based Programming is a
programming methodology created by J Paul Morrisson at IBM in the 70s
in order to solve everyday challenges he faced when developing large
scale business applications. Based on a solid theoretical foundation
and battle-tested on real-world applications (with one of them running
continuously for the last 40 years), FBP is making a comeback as an
effective model to reason about and implement data intensive,
distributed applications, as can be seen by the growing interest in
tools like NoFlo and Storm.

In this talk I will present the history and fundamental concepts of
Flow-based Programming, and how it is different from other models like
dataflow, functional and object-oriented programming. We will then use
noflo to develop a small heterogeneous application using this
methodology.

And here is the talk video:

I think the talk went well and that I managed to get the main ideas across, although looking back it probably sounded a bit confusing because I couldn't see my notes during most of the talk. I'll see if I can expand those notes a bit and post them as a follow-up to this post. In the mean time do check the other Codebits 2014 talk videos, there's lots of good stuff there.

Here's hoping to be able to present again next year to showcase dataflower to the Codebits crowd.